Arcade Fire – Reflektor (Merge)
The apocalypse doesn’t announce itself the way you think it will, in hurricanes and alarms and breathless news reports. It arrives as a steady accumulation of seemingly unrelated incidents and facts. By the time you realize what is happening, what has already happened, there’s no chance to escape, no way to get out.
At least that’s how things unfolded in Key Abismo, Florida—a region with its left foot, even in the best of times, already planted in hell’s driveway. The end days might have gone down differently for people in New Jersey or Colorado. I’ll be sure to ask them if I ever get the chance.
I was staying at Manatee Point when it happened, a hotel/condominium resort filled with empty bottles, both plastic and glass, and endless surgeries, both life-saving and plastic. My wife’s grandparents owned a yacht docked in the marina, a horseshoe-shaped inlet of water that housed nearly a dozen boats. And even though I was still sore from yesterday’s flight, the back-and-forth hassle with the rental car people[i], as well as the trafficky shitshow drive from Miami down to Key Abismo—the highways had shed their lanes so quickly along the route that they resembled a funnel—I still got up at 7am, bright and early enough to hit the pool before any of the other guests woke from their collective tropical hangover.
Manatee Point provided two pools for its guests. A lower pool stretching the length of a football field around an unstaffed cabana had been designed to resemble an ocean the way its water ran right up to the recessed concrete, its ankle-high waves trickling against a manmade shore. Tiny stereo speakers placed around the deck, hidden amongst the iceplant shrubbery, blared instrumental steel-drum versions of once-popular hits like ‘Play That Funky Music White Boy’ and ‘Fun Fun Fun.’ It was laughably surreal, at times horrific.
I preferred the upper pool—a smaller, more low-key place without any music.
The morning was already humid enough for the rocks along the path to be moist with sweat. The rising sun behind me painted the sky a deeply clementine-like shade of orange. Sand and strategically placed plants lined my path to the pool. A small family of palm trees towered overhead. Years ago there used to be a hammock strung between two of them where I would go read whenever I needed to escape my wife’s family, but the hammock frayed over time until it eventually collapsed. Manatee Point wasn’t what it used to be. And while the rest of the world wasn’t what it used to be either, it seemed MP already had a bit more ‘apocalyptic momentum’ going for it than most places.
The pool towered above me as I ascended the marble steps, its black fence a series of thin vertical prison-like bars rising up out of the concrete. My heart swelled slightly with excitement—a minor engorgement, but more than I’d felt in months. In my anticipation, I didn’t notice the sign until I had already pulled on the gate several times. By the time I looked down and noticed the padlock and its attendant chain, I had nearly worked myself into a frenzy.
POOL CLOSED FOR REPAIRS
The sign was worthless. How long was the pool going to be closed? An hour? A week? A month? And if it was closed for repairs, where were the workers? The entire area was completely deserted, and more annoyingly, the pool looked exactly the same as the last time I’d been here. It was even filled with water, beautiful blue water sparkling in the early light. A contented seagull bobbed listlessly along its surface. There had to be some misunderstanding. I set off immediately in search of a groundsperson, some official who could straighten this out.
I headed into the clubhouse[ii], but only heard my shouts echoing back off the tile. Walking around to the front of the building, I set out up a paved road that led towards the resort entrance—a manned gate where the security guard on duty sits inside a little shack no bigger than a tollbooth. But when I got there, I found a sign on the door.
BACK IN FIVE MINITES
Once an hour, the guard was supposed to make his rounds and scan his badge at a series of twelve checkpoints scattered throughout the resort to make sure he wasn’t sleeping on the job. Doing the math, I calculated there had only been a one-in-twelve chance of missing him. This did not bode well for the rest of my day.
I didn’t have my phone; I never carry a watch. There was no way of being sure how much time passed while I waited, but it felt like ten minutes had gone by with still no sign of the guard. Then a car pulled up to the entrance gate, an oversized BMW—probably a rental. After a few seconds the driver started nudging his horn and gesturing with his hands for me to come over and open the gate. Despite the fact I wasn’t wearing white tennis shorts, or a green polo shirt with a yellow MP intertwined just above the left breast, the driver seemed to think I was the guard. I avoided eye contact and hoped the guard would return quickly, but then the driver rolled down his window and shouted for me to get my ass in there and open the goddamned gate before he had me fired.
I decided to just get the hell out of there. On my way back to the boat I decided to swing by the pool one last time, as if maybe the sign had been a hallucination I could just shake out of my head.
But it was still there. The seagull had left though. It all made sense later, once I had found out what had happened, but in that moment I just stood there dumbfounded, my world thrown into chaos by an out of commission swimming pool that would turn out to be the first sign of the apocalypse.
Lifting my head to the sky, I could breathe the unmistakable smell of approaching sulfur.
But at this point I knew nothing of the end times; I only knew that my morning was ruined. Hoping that the sick churning feeling in my stomach might be related to hunger, I grabbed my keys and wallet and hopped in the rental car—a red two-doored Ford Fiero—and decided to head into downtown Key Abismo to get some breakfast.
The exit gate opened automatically when I reached it. The BMW, now abandoned, still sat blocking the entrance gate to my left. The misspelled sign still remained in the window of the guard’s booth. I shrugged my shoulders at the hopelessness of it all and pulled out into traffic.
As perilously thin as a popsicle stick across a bathtub, the Florida Keys are a strip of islands that run southwest from Miami for about 150 miles, sticking out into the Gulf of Mexico like a timid finger beckoning an unseen watery g-spot, with Key Abismo sitting about a third of the way down.[iii] The Atlantic Ocean borders the south side of the Keys, and to the north sits the Gulf of Mexico. Despite the fact that these islands are emaciated, geographically speaking, to the point where you can see both bodies of water at once in most places, people down here still have ugly, irrational biases concerning the northsiders vs. the southsiders.
Key Abismo is the widest of all the Keys, nearly four miles across in its thickest parts, and so it’s been built up into the largest shopping and residential area between Florida City (the southernmost point of mainland Florida, about 15 miles south of Miami) and Key West. The stink of illicit trade, hustling its way up and down the islands in black Escalades with tinted windows and out of state plates, hangs over the community like a kidnapping victim unable to speak. It’s a region of open veins and tired eyes, though you’d have to look closely—past the pleasant tourism surface and into the faces of the people who actually live there—in order to notice.
Strangely enough there’s no McDonald’s in Key Abismo, but there’s nearly every other American fast-food chain. You’ve got your Burger King, your Arby’s, your Starbucks, even a KFC. There used to be a Taco Bell as you headed south out of town towards Islamorada that sat on a grassy median between the split north-south routes of US 1, but it closed years ago. The parking lot was now several years overgrown; weeds had cracked through the pavement while otherworldly vines now twisted in and out of the restaurant’s stucco exterior. It seemed tragic, in an ironic-fate-of-the-cosmos sense, that the residents of Key Abismo—the non-itinerant ones, the people who spent their lives working here and raising their children—never got to sample the Doritos Loco taco, a recent innovation that substituted the traditional Taco Bell corn shell for one made out of nacho-cheese flavored Doritos. Not a series of loose Doritos stitched together either, but something that looked like the Taco Bell people had climbed into a vat of pre-cooked Dorito dough to stretch and fashion it until they finally had something that resembled a taco shell, something that could pass for the real thing.[iv]
There were also a number of family-owned food places, most of them started up by expatriates from the northeastern US lured down here by the promise of unending tourists and an absence of snow. They tended to have names like Tommy’s Bagels or Jimmy’s Seaside Crabs. My personal favorite was Mike’s Rarefied Sushi Hut—based entirely on the name, the food was nearly inedible. My wife’s grandmother left a note for us on the boat when we came down here on our honeymoon listing the best places to eat in the area. Next to Mike’s she had gone back and written ‘Important: Must Like Oriental Food.’ That’s her way of being helpful, though it would have been more helpful if she had written ‘Important: Must Like Stomach Cramps That Last Into the Following Day.’ Based on our honeymoon, a disaster rooted in food poisoning and unfulfilled expectations, I should have guessed even then that my marriage would consist of one adversity after another.[v] But as we have already determined, I am not one to spot revelation, even when it’s staring me in the face.
Wanting to keep my human interactions to a minimum, I decided to go through the Burger King drive-thru and order a sausage/egg/cheese croissanwich. Each of its three main ingredients tasted exactly alike, flavorless except for the obscene amounts of salt. Pulling back onto the road, I managed to eat half of it before I threw the rest out the window. Despite my breakfast’s biodegradable qualities,[vi] I was lucky not to get a ticket. The Keys had some of the harshest littering laws in America, and with decreased property values sapping the community’s tax base, the local police enforced them with enthusiastic vengeance.
Key Abismo only had two traffic lights, one to the south where US 1 split into outgoing and oncoming traffic, and one to handle all the cars turning in and out of the Publix Shopping Center—the local teenagers, along with a handful of adults who didn’t mature the way society hoped they would, pronounced it ‘Pube-Licks’. As the only grocery store for 50 miles in either direction, shopping at Publix could be a real nuggety little cluster of fuck, but slightly less so at 8 in the morning.
I have two rules when it comes to grocery store parking lots. One: never drive past the entrance of the store. And two: always park as far away from the other cars as possible; it’s worth the walk. Both rules are designed to minimize frustration, to prevent getting stuck dragging along behind the old man pushing his groceries—usually a family-sized pack of chips, two cases of beer, and a sugar-free cherry pie[vii]—in the middle of the lane, or a housewife leaving the store and crossing the street diagonally at an angle so actue as to be in the single digits. It’s bad enough inside the store: Hey, why not just put your cart sideways while you look at the canned vegetables so you can block THE WHOLE AISLE. I just need to grab a loaf of bread but I guess this guy standing in front of the one I want has never seen bread before and it’s going to take him FIVE MINUTES TO MAKE UP HIS MIND.
Outside the store, you’re at least able to exercise some degree of control.
But the downside of parking so far away is you have to walk that much further to get to the doors. I don’t mind the physical effort, or even the heat, but it does allow way too much time to interact with the crazies. With a place like Manatee Point awash in all kinds of pharmaceutical damage—powdered, liquid, herbal, and synthetic[viii]—it almost goes without saying that the regular population is ingesting cheaper and rattier stuff, and in even more destructive quantities. This doesn’t always play itself out in public like crack or heroin does, with people staggering around looking like death and stealing everything in sight. Drug use in Key Abismo tends to manifest itself in dropped dishes and slurred speech, pock-marked skin and long-sleeved shirts. Like everything here, addiction prides itself on being laidback. Even the junkies are living on island time. They don’t cook up and shoot; they just pop their pills in ever-increasing handfuls and try to keep on smiling.
And occasionally people cross over the double yellow line and kill a family coming back from Key West, along with themselves. Did I mention yet that Monroe County, which encompasses the entirety of the Keys, had the highest vehicular fatality rate in the nation?
I parked under a palm tree—even in April the sun is unbearable. Pressing the keychain lock button, I suddenly jumped backwards at the sound of bicycle tires skidding to a halt behind me. I turned to see an emaciated shirtless man with psychopathic eyes and, judging by the way he was breathing, suspect lungs. His haircut looked like he had been shaved by a blind malicious chimp. He straddled his bicycle, a yellow-brown fixed gear number several sizes too small, and grinned at me.
‘The Feds are moving in!’ he shouted in a brown rasp covered in phlegm. ‘Grassin on the grassers, as they say in merry old England. Getting their jollys off the jolly ranchers yes sir old chap.’ I tried to avoid eye contact and walk away, but he got off the bike and jumped in front of me with a surprising dexterity. Blocking my path to the store, he continued, ‘Yes sirree old bob! Bobbin for bobbies. Pavements and sidewalks. Elevators and lifts!’ He was beaming from earlobe to earlobe and nodding his head as if we understood each other.
‘Anything else?’ I asked. Schizophrenics don’t faze me that much. I used to live in a city.
‘Oh there’s loads more!’ he shouted. ‘Loads more. But you already know what it is, don’t you?’ And something about the way he bent towards me, the mad conviction in his eyes, the stale beef jerky under his breath, made me curious. I didn’t think that he knew anything necessarily, I just wanted to know what he thought I knew.
‘Oh you don’t know,’ he smiled, no longer shouting, almost whispering in my ear. ‘You don’t know that you know…but you know. You know everything.’ He turned and gestured to a woman in green sweatpants loading her groceries. ‘They don’t know. They have no idea. But you—you’ve already seen it.’ I grimaced and shook my head, and then he started to laugh, calmly at first but escalating rapidly into wheezing hysterics. I pushed past him, actually making contact with his chest and its filthy matted blonde hair. This only made him laugh harder.
‘See you later man! Enjoy your fucking groceries!’
[i] Always, always, always rent a car from a company you’ve heard of before. Whatever money you save by going with the cheapest online option will always be offset by hidden charges that will still continue to accrue even after you’ve returned the car. This, in turn, will lead to three months of counseling sessions to help deal with the ensuing psychological issues that recur—namely a difficulty controlling one’s anger and a near-pathological inability to trust—to the point where even ordering a pizza becomes a battle against one’s endlessly replicating dark thoughts.
[ii] The clubhouse was a majestic two-story building decked out in the kind of expensive gaudiness typical of the region. The ground floor housed a spacious exercise room with six elliptical machines—this despite the fact I’d never seen more than one person in the gym at any given time—along with a set of gender-specific bathrooms/showers. The upstairs, furnished in sleek marble and leather couches, seemed designed to entertain large groups of people. One could imagine a grander, more luxurious time in Manatee Point’s past when there were parties here every night, catered affairs with bartenders pouring drinks while the guests compared fishing stories and diamond sizes into the night. Now it just sat empty, a flat-screen tv mounted on the wall broadcasting ESPN around the clock to an audience of none, in perpetuity, advertising infinitum.
[iii] If we’re going to follow this finger/map analogy all the way to the end, K.A. sits just before the third knuckle, and Key West sits at the end like a calloused fingertip.
[iv] I use the term ‘real’ here as loosely as possible. Although in retrospect it’s possible that a closed swimming pool might have actually been the second sign of the apocalypse.
[v] It is safe to say I was not put on this earth to be a decent husband. Most days, it seemed I was barely put on this earth to be a decent human being.
[vi] I grant that my faith in the ecological benefits of a BK sandwich may be a little naive, but then salt has a way of making me hopeful—I think the primordial link to our blood reminds me, even subconsciously, of our potential for evolution, the determination of life to endure. If some shared amphibian ancestor could adapt to life on land, could morph gill into lung, then surely mankind can one day figure out how to, you know, not starve each other to death for profit.
[vii] Because of his diabetes, obviously.
[viii] Particularly synthetic. You can abuse as much of that stuff as you want as long as you’re able to get a prescription. And the great thing about being rich, probably the biggest incentive to even try and become rich, is getting to live a life where someone will always give you a prescription.
Pages: 1 2
8 Responses to Arcade Fire – Reflektor (Merge)